by Jeff Kirkham
Noah looked inside. At first, he didn’t quite know what he was seeing.
He turned back to the Air Force captain. “If we’re going to do anything, we have to do it now. How many men do you have?”
“Fifty base security men and another forty locals we’re paying with MREs to work base security, but I can only send some of them.”
Noah pointed in the bed of the truck. “Can I have all this and half the men?”
“I’m not going to place my men under the command of a civilian I barely met. You can have any of the civilians you can talk into it, and I’ll send half my airmen under the command of my first lieutenant. And, Mister Cowboy, I can assure you that my lieutenant will shoot you dead if he finds out you’re fucking with us to any degree. Is that clear?”
“My name is Noah Miller, by the way, and I hope I’m wrong about the armored column coming here, but I really don’t think I am.” He returned the hard stare. “I was there to see the genocide they committed in New Mexico. If you knew what I knew, you’d be sending all your men and commanding them yourself, Captain.”
“No, I wouldn’t, Mister Miller. I’m under orders you wouldn’t understand.”
Noah had no idea what he meant. But he did understand the sentiment. He’d spent the last two weeks under orders he didn’t understand too.
“They got a hundred Abrams tanks?” a man at the back of the room voiced everyone’s incredulity. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he didn’t look like a stranger to firearms, either. He wore a cowboy’s plaid shirt, cowboy boots, Wrangler jeans and he cradled an over-under shotgun across his lap.
“Affirmative,” Noah answered.
The old cafeteria exploded in conversation. Without air conditioning, it had to be over a hundred degrees and Noah was sweating like two rats screwing in a wool sock.
At least this cafeteria had been built before air conditioning, Noah thought to himself. Modern buildings were absolutely hotboxes now that HVAC had gone the way of the brontosaurus. He glanced around for clues as to how they’d managed indoor circulation before modern refrigeration. He had no idea.
Noah stood on a small stage at the front of the cafeteria beside the base captain and he did his best to reign in the distractions that beset him. Standing in front of a room full of fighting men was literally the last place he wanted to be.
That damned grocery sack…
Captain Sparks had called everyone together in the base cafeteria the moment they’d arrived from the gypsum mine. An understanding of the situation evolved in Noah’s mind.
This small force of a hundred men, give or take, had pulled back from the massive Nellis Air Force base back to the vintage, 1950s base at the north end of the property. It appeared to have been the air base when the Air Force still fielded prop fighters and bombers—the runways far too short for modern aircraft. It was a miniature version of the modern base, and because of the geography and the roads, it’d been much easier for base security to hold this piece of ground than the full footprint of Nellis. But why were they holding the base at all? Why hadn’t everyone just gone home like Noah had seen at the Tucson National Guard airfield?
Captain Sparks shouted for order and the room quieted.
Noah continued. “I believe the narcos are trying for the Dry Lake Refinery. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that they need the gas. If we move fast, we can destroy the refinery right now and deprive them of their objective.”
“Where are the tanks right now?” a young airman asked.
“I don’t have eyes-on the tanks, but I believe they’re about three hours out from Dry Lake, moving across Henderson and North Las Vegas. They’re being forced to clear the roads ahead of themselves.”
The desert rat at the back spoke again. “Yeah, but if we blow up the refinery, we’ll still have an armored column and two thousand gangbangers on our doorstep—more pissed off than a kicked rattler. What about the nukes? We can’t stop tanks, Captain.”
Noah turned to the captain and gaped. He knew nothing about any nukes.
“Gentlemen,” the captain interrupted, “please remember operational security.” The captain sighed and turned to Noah. “We’re defending nuclear ordnance. That’s our mission here. The Air Force didn’t have time or assets to relocate the Level Six munitions stored at this base. They’re underground in bunkers between our current position and the solar field we passed on our way here.”
Another crusty-looking civilian interrupted. “If those criminals can get American tanks running and gunning, they can probably get the nukes working too. What’s a drug cartel going to do with nukes? We got families here, Captain. They ain’t dying in a nuclear fight. I ain’t going to let that happen.”
Captain Sparks shook his head. “Nuclear munitions don’t work like that, Bobby. They require fire codes and technical expertise in order to arm them.”
Even Noah could see that nobody in the room was entirely convinced. They were probably all thinking the same thing: if narcos could figure out the M1 Abrams main battle tank, given enough time, they could almost certainly figure out the nuclear warheads.
Reading the room, Captain Sparks sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Can we bring the refinery down on top of them, Mister Miller? You’ve seen this before. Can it be done?”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to try,” the man with the shotgun shouted from the back of the room. “We gotta do all the damage we can, even if we all die in the process. Fuck those dirty sons of whores. We’re all walking dead men anyway. Let’s burn ‘em.”
The room erupted in agreement. Captain Sparks raised a hand.
“Gentlemen. I hear you loud and clear. There’s not a single coward in this room and we’re all willing to sacrifice our lives to protect our families. But there’s a smart way to do this and a dumb way to do this. If we’re going to die, let’s make it count…Mister Miller, how do we make it count?” The Air Force captain turned to Noah.
Noah felt way, way outside his pay grade. He was being asked to risk lives again, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t get sucked into that. Not after what happened to Artesia. Still, it made sense. Of everyone in that room, he was the only man who had faced the narcos on the field of battle. Apparently, the captain felt the same. The men in that room were clear on the risks, and they had no illusions about the suicidal nature of their mission. No matter if Noah was a fresh-faced fraud or not, he had been here before, and that made him the smartest man in the room.
God help them all.
For better or for worse, the die was cast. Men poured out of the cafeteria, each one to the fight that would define his life.
“Sir. Hold on…” Noah pushed through the crowd and caught up with the cowboy. The man spun around when Noah put a hand on his shoulder. He looked lost in thought, which made sense given that he’d just volunteered to die.
“Brother,” Noah handed the man his 30-30 rifle. “How about we swap guns, just for tonight? I’m guessing you know how to run one of these…”
The aging cowboy accepted the 30-30 and traded Noah his over-and-under shotgun. The cowboy ran the lever on the 30-30, ejected a live shell and caught it spinning in mid-air with his right hand.
“Yep. I hunted whitetail with one of these for thirty years back in Oklahoma. My dad hunted with one, and his dad before him. I wish that hunting rifle was here right now in Nevada, but this one will do. It’ll do perfectly.” The man ran the slide over an empty chamber and reloaded the loose round in the tubular magazine. The cowboy didn’t smile, but the sun-worn, wrinkled skin around his eyes bespoke a long look down the hallway of eternity. “I’ll buy you time, Mister. You make the time count. Got it?” The cowboy drilled Noah’s eyes with his own and Noah nodded. “Is it sighted in?”
“It’s dead on-the-nose, sir.” Noah dug a box of 30-30 shells out of his pocket with the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun and passed it to the cowboy. The cowboy stuck the box of shells in his Wranglers.
“Hey, you should know t
hat the last time I did this…” Noah waved to the crowd of men preparing for a gunfight, “a lot of good people got killed. I’m probably to blame.” He didn’t know why he’d just blurted that out. It wasn’t the best idea, given they were heading into battle and low morale wouldn’t help anyone.
The cowboy stared into Noah’s eyes through wind-burned slits. “Good judgment comes from experience and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.” The cowboy glanced at the 30-30 in his hands, nodded to Noah, turned and walked out into the merciless sun.
Chapter 36
Tavo Castillo
Dry Lake Refinery, Interstate 15 and Highway 93, Fifteen miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada
Tavo called his recon team for the sixth time with no answer. He’d ordered the column to stop at the offramp to the Dry River refinery. From a kilometer away, the refinery seemed intact.
The column had finally arrived at the freeway turnoff at five o’clock in the afternoon. The roads had been choked with dead vehicles from Hoover Dam into Las Vegas and then again, from Las Vegas north to the Dry River exit. At least half of the hulled-out cars had California license plates. In the light of day, Tavo saw plenty of dead people under bushes. A couple times, he saw entire families. The putrescence of death drifted ripe in the autumn heat, cupped by the Las Vegas valley and cooked to perfection by the blazing sun.
That smell filled all space between thought. There was no hiding from it. Not in a car, not in a building, not out in the desert breeze. Even the wind breathed sweet with the curse of it.
The plow tanks had gotten more adept at moving cars without skewering them, but it’d still taken eleven hours to travel the last forty-seven miles to reach the Dry Lake refinery. Based on the absence of smoke, the refinery wasn’t on fire. But his men weren’t answering Tavo’s calls, and that couldn’t be good.
Far to the south, Las Vegas smoldered. Like the smoking corpse of the demon of greed, it had been burned on the pyre of Western civilization. No new cars issued from the corpse of Vegas, but plenty had tried to escape this way before the desert claimed them. Tavo’s column had come north of the city, but the endless parade of carcasses and sun-scorched vehicles persisted off into the horizon—off toward the gateway to Southern Utah. With all else vacant desert, the line of dead cars pulled Tavo’s binoculars back to the only thing worth glassing—the I-15 freeway. It was chock-a-block full of abandoned cars, dead people and the scattered remnants of their lives, but he could detect no living threat on the roadway. The desert stretched blank and lonesome for scores of miles in every direction, eventually rising up into steel-gray mountains that marked the borders of Utah.
“What’s up, Jefe?” Beto sauntered back to Tavo’s Humvee. They’d been stopped there for five minutes. Tavo didn’t quite know, so he didn’t answer. He climbed on the hood, trying in vain to locate his recon team—or the threat that killed them.
“The recon team isn’t answering.”
“You think they got ambushed?” Beto jumped to the worst possible conclusion.
The refinery sat about a kilometer off the freeway, but over that kilometer, and for kilometers around the refinery, there was no cover; not a stone nor a bush bigger than a trashcan. The ground ran sandy and flat as far as the eye could see. Still, Tavo knew the desert, and he knew that water had to travel somewhere when it rained, no matter how rare. There would be washes and depressions. An ambush would be waiting in one of those, if there was any ambush at all.
“Maybe they let their batteries run out on the sat phone,” Beto suggested.
Tavo dropped his binoculars around his neck. “Would you let your batteries run out if your life depended on it?”
“Me? Of course not… I agree. This doesn’t smell right. Then again, nothing has smelled right since Hoover Dam.”
Tavo ignored the joke. He needed to order his thoughts, so he spoke them out loud, not really caring if Beto was there to listen.
“The refinery looks intact. Our recon team is likely dead. We have an overwhelming force, but the refinery is sensitive to kinetics. If we hit it hard, we lose it. This refinery isn’t nearly as large as Pecos River or Monterrey. We can’t afford to shoot in or around it. Nellis Air Force Base is a ghost town, and we didn’t take any fire from Nellis when we passed. Any resistance in the refinery would likely be locals. That means they’d be unorganized. But if they’re here, they know we want gas. Otherwise, why would they be here?”
“How do we know they’re here at all?” Beto wondered, interrupting Tavo’s thought process.
Tavo answered out of habit. “We don’t know they’re here. All we know is that our recon element isn’t answering their fucking radio.” The thought made Tavo turn and look the way they’d come, south up the Interstate. The column of tanks and trucks stretched back toward Vegas for four kilometers, disappearing over a gentle rise in the freeway.
The front third of the column had been set up to serve as Tavo’s war hammer. He’d mixed Humvees, technicals and six Abrams tanks into the lead element. The center section of the column protected the fuel trucks. The rear third held the bulk of the Abrams main battle tanks with a smattering of Humvees as a quick reaction rear guard. No amount of organization could have prepared them for an air attack if Nellis mounted one, but they hadn’t seen a single aircraft on the runways. The gates dangled open, the base a dried-out corpse.
“Okay. So what’s the play, coach?” Since Tavo had taken command, he noticed that Beto had stopped doing his own thinking, opting to pass all decision-making back to Tavo. With the stakes being so high—total domination or total defeat—Tavo couldn’t afford it any other way. But he still didn’t like it. Beto had recently led a massive criminal enterprise. He shook his head at how quickly Beto had fallen back to taking orders. The human race was nothing if not predictable. Without a compelling reason for excellence, most every man devolves into laziness. Even life-or-death peril does little to change that sad truth. Tavo hated other men for their obviousness, but he celebrated it too. All of that predictability elevated him to where he stood now: a god among lesser beings.
“Tonight, we clear the refinery with our best assaulters. Tomorrow morning, we send twenty tanks and two hundred men inside the fence to protect the fuel tanks. Then, we make a ring around the refinery about three kilometers across.” Tavo painted a loop with his finger in the air around the refinery in the distance. “Once everyone’s set, we close the loop and trap anyone hiding inside. If we kick up ambushers in the desert, they’ll be surrounded. After that, the refinery will be secure, and we can build permanent defenses and set LP/OPs in a three-kilometer perimeter. This refinery will be much easier to protect than Pecos River. Here, we don’t have a town full of refugees pressed up against us, thank God.”
“What if they’re already inside?” Beto asked. The only cover for kilometers was the refinery—a jumble of tanks and pipes contained by a chain-link fence.
“If they’re inside, it’s a suicide mission for them. Any fight would bring the refinery down on top of them, with us surrounding it, cutting off any escape. I’m betting nobody is willing to die a flaming death just to defend some gasoline. No matter how ruined up their country is right now, they’re still Americans. They’re not Al Queda. They don’t sacrifice their lives on faith.”
Beto boiled Tavo’s plan down to his own terms. “We send an assault force inside tonight to root out any ambushers. Then we surround the refinery with a three kilometer ring and shrink it down until we clear any sleepers in the desert. Right?”
“Correct.”
“The guys on the inside ring and the guys on the outside ring will be shooting toward each other if this thing touches off. Are we cool with that?”
“Yes. It’s the only way to protect the gas. The gas is worth a thousand men.”
Beto turned and watched the sun droop over the mountains to the west, slicing through the pall of smoke coming up from Vegas. The smoke-soaked sun painted everything deep orange. “Should we set our perimete
r now and execute at first light?”
Tavo sighed. Beto really had relegated all conscious thought to him. “No. The advantage of attacking at first light would be negatively offset by the disadvantages of having our forces spread out over a thirteen kilometer ring all night. Circle the wagons here at the offramp. Send out the warning order to your assaulters that they’ll be assaulting the refinery at 3 a.m. The tanks will move into position at first light and then prosecute when everyone’s set. There’s no advantage to surprise at this point. The whole world knows we’re here.”
Beto nodded. “Roger that, Boss.”
“Assemble a team of forty assaulters. I want you to lead the hunt. You’ll go in under cover of darkness and surgically pick that facility apart with NVGs and thermal monoculars. I want every inch of that refinery eyeballed before we send in tanks. If there’s anyone stupid enough to start a gunfight in the shadow of millions of gallons of gasoline, you kill them one-at-a-time with NVGs and precision gunfire.”
Beto grinned. “You coming, Tavo? Just like the old days?”
“Not this time. You do it.” Tavo didn’t feel comfortable putting himself downrange of Beto’s M4, particularly not under the cover of darkness. At the moment, Tavo didn’t trust anyone, particularly not this grinning fool.
The weather in his head had gone from sunny with a chance of afternoon showers to a storm-laden tornado watch. Being entirely honest with himself, Tavo wondered if his self-imposed isolation and the stress of combat was mucking with the chemical soup in his brain. Maybe it was his suspicions about Sofía. Maybe it was the threat of an ambush. Maybe it was just this horrible, fucking smell. For whatever reason, Tavo’s intensity had cranked up to Level Ten.
It’d taken the collapse of civilization for him to find the ways he and Pablo Escobar were actually quite alike. At the end of the day, maybe both men were utterly and truly alone. Maybe when the do-or-die moments arrived, when they stood on the precipice of empire, perhaps destiny demanded utter withdrawal from humankind as its price of passage. An immortal would deny himself his brothers-in-arms. His fellows in faith. Even his family.
